Stiff Fingers
by ncfan
Summary: Nothing seemed the way she remembered it.


I own nothing.

* * *

Even when she was living, before, it had been so long since Ilmanis had played a harp. Her hands bore quill and needle still, just as she had learned when she was a child. But in Beleriand, she had learned to wield sword and knife, learned how to shoot, had insisted that her husband teach her these things. She had learned to hold and use things that were used to kill, not to make music and song. Never had it given her any joy, but still, she had killed. Orcs and Quendi alike she had killed, and bore infamy for it, even if the infamy she bore was nothing on the scale of Makalaurë's, or his brothers'.

Ilmanis had died, and now lived again. She stood in an empty room, Vása's light pouring through the windows. This was her home when she was a girl, before she had wed. It ought to have been as familiar to her as own skin was.

_But my skin is not familiar to me any longer, _Ilmanis mused ruefully. _I am still growing re-accustomed to it. This place is not familiar to me at all, and the people who live here are strangers, and hold me strange._

_This place is strange._

Nothing looked the way she faintly remembered it. It should not have been this way; the time Ilmanis spent living elsewhere far outweighed the time she had spent in the house where she was born, but it was still the place where she had spent all of her formative years. It wasn't.

The light of Vása shining through the windows was all wrong. It should have been Laurelin's light, not the light of the vessel imbued with her last fruit. This light was too dim, too gray and weak. The walls should have been shining gold, not merely lit up with Vása's light. She felt as though doused in shadow, as though she was still in the Halls of Waiting, drifting rudderless through featureless twilight.

There were other things that were off as well.

She did not remember the bed being so small, the bedposts so short. The braided rug on the floor had been more vivid in hue the last time she laid eyes upon it. When she set her feet upon the stone of the floor where the rug did not touch, she could have sworn that the sound her footsteps had made had been quieter when Tirion was bathed in gold and silver light.

Nor did Ilmanis remember such wary and hostile stares, nor did she remember hearing whispering wherever she went. From neighbors, from the maids and the housekeeper, from kin who had been forced to come stay here after the massacre at Alqualondë. Ilmanis had thought she knew solitude in Mandos' twilit Halls, but at least there she could easily find those who would not shun her or did not fear her.

There was just one thing that existed just as she had remembered it.

There was the harp, resting in a sunlit corner of the room. Her mother said that when the strings rotted, she would replace them, for all the time that Ilmanis had been "away"; harps made by their people had charms placed on the frames to keep them from rotting and wasting away, but the harp strings were another matter entirely. This was the cherry wood harp that had been wrought for her when she was nearly-grown, and had outgrown the one she used as a child. There was another that her mother had made when she came of age, but Ilmanis had taken that with her to Beleriand. It had survived the burning of the Gap, unlike Makalaurë's childhood harp, but she knew not what had become of it after she died.

It had been so long. Ilmanis could not help but think that, as she drew the harp into her arms, and settled on the floor. In Beleriand, she had gradually lost all love for music. Emptiness filled her heart instead. She would stare down at her harp and where once songs would instantly spring to her mind, she felt nothing. The same thing seemed to happen to Makalaurë, but she wondered sometimes, if the thing that filled his heart instead of music was emptiness after all.

She had heard the stories of what became of him. Her mother made sure she knew, wanting to make sure she knew before she could read it in a book or hear the words slung at her like a hail of stones. Ilmanis already knew. The tapestries told her what had become of her husband. To know that he had vanished out of history, had vanished out of legend and song, it gave her grief. It made her wonder, what would have happened if she had lived. _I wanted to come home so badly. I wanted to see our home again so badly. I regretted everything. I would not leave him, and yet I felt regret._

_I wonder if he would have left us all, if I had lived._

Wherever Makalaurë was, he certainly wasn't playing a harp. Whatever else Ilmanis did or did not know, she knew that. She did not even think he sang, whatever the legends told. She imagined him sitting by the beach in silence, lost in disconsolate misery, retreating into himself as he so often did when in such a mood. Except that this one would have lasted for six hundred years now.

Ilmanis stared down at the harp in her lap, brow drawn. She ran her hand over the frame, trying to familiarize herself with it once again. The ring of twisted gold that she should not have woken in Lórien with (yet had anyways) glinted and flashed in the light.

With a new body, the deeds she had committed in another life and the grief and heaviness she had felt then supposedly (but not really) gone, surely Ilmanis should have been able to search for and find joy in music again. Surely she could find it?

It had been so long.

Her fingers fluttered over the shimmering strings. Ilmanis choked as she remembered Doriathrin spears driving into her belly and her chest. That phantom memory slammed the breath out of her lungs, driving all else out of her mind, trying to drive all the music out of her heart and the life out of her body, as it had done before. What right did she have to make music, when she had slain the innocent in the course of a quest she did not believe in? She gasped, drew in shuddering breaths. When the memory subsided, when the memory of pain left her, Ilmanis drew her fingers up again.

Ilmanis strummed a few scales, drawing her fingers across the strings. She had really grown unfamiliar with this. Her fingers were stiff and unschooled, muscle memory gone from this body, even if in mind she remembered it all clearly. She felt clumsy and awkward as she had the first day she walked into music lessons.

She would have to reawaken the memories her body held, then. Maybe, in the process, Ilmanis could even reawaken the love she had once felt.

* * *

Makalaurë—Maglor

Quendi—Elves (singular: Quendë) (Quenya)  
Vása—the Exilic name for the Sun, signifying 'The Consumer' (Quenya)


End file.
